Advance Your Sewing Skills Session 4: Tips for Sewing Curves & Corners

No matter what your sewing, eventually you're gonna run into either a curve or a corner. Now, we're going to start with the curves today and talk a little bit about those and then move on to our corners. So this, obviously we just have a nice curve seam. This could be something like if you're going to make a little pocket for the front of an apron or something or maybe a little girl's dress, this is a common shape you'd find. So there's a couple of things that I wanna point out when you're actually stitching the curves.

And so I have one that I have not stitched. I just have it pinned and I have it ready to go. So now, what I like to do with my curves when I'm pinning them, is make sure that I have for one plenty of pins in place. This is a pretty small piece, so I only have three, I could even put a few more pins in here, but what I wanna make sure is that, I have pins anywhere, that when I'm stitching around nothing is going to shift on me. Because I'm doing a lot of moving with curves, especially the smaller they get.

There's a bigger chance for your fabric to actually move while you're stitching. So, make sure you've got plenty of pins in place when your stitching. So, I'm just gonna start out stitching our curve, and we'll talk a little bit about how we maneuver around the edges of our curve. Now, since this is just a sample, I'm not really worried about seam allowance so I'm just going to be on around a scant 1/4 inch. So now the first couple inches of my curve here, they're actually pretty straight.

So I don't have anything to worry about. I can just let the feed dogs pull my fabric underneath my presser foot, remove my pin as I get to it. But now I'm gonna start getting into the curved area of my seam that I'm stitching. So what I wanna do is make sure that if I need to make a big adjustment, then I go ahead and stop, or just either stop or slow down my stitching before I wanna start turning. What I don't wanna do, is stitch too far and at the last minute realize, Oh, I needed to make a really big adjustment.

Then I'm not going to have a nice even curve as I go around. So again, I'm going fairly slow, and I want to make sure, that if I need to make an adjustment, I either stop or slow down to do so. And it might get to a point where if I'm going around a curve, I might actually have to lift up my presser foot with my needle down and make a tiny adjustment and then keep going. I would rather stop and lift up my foot to make an adjustment, rather than trying to pull my fabric this way, you can see it sort of puckers up in front of your presser foot. You don't want that to happen because then when your foot slightly lifts to make the next stitch, your fabric is going to move too far.

You're going to have a skewed stitch. So you have to lift your presser foot and make the adjustments while your presser foot is lifted, then you can lower it and continue stitching. You might only be able to go two or three stitches at a time before you need to stop, and then make any adjustments before continuing on along your curve. You can just pick up and adjust a little bit as you go. And it doesn't matter how many curves you sewn, how long you've been sewing, you don't need to try and worry about going super fast around curves.

Especially if this is something like a pocket that's going to be a detail on the front of a shirt or an apron or wherever you're going to put it. You wanna make sure that it looks really nice. So it doesn't really matter how fast you get it done, if it doesn't look nice and professional once you've actually finished. So I'm gonna finish up this side of my curve again stopping to adjust where I need to. And I'm almost back up to the straight portion of this little sample here.

And I can just finish off this edge, and then we'll look at what we've got with our stitching here. So as you can see, we have a nice, even row of stitching. I don't have anywhere where my stitching is maybe pointed in a little more, pointed out because of the fabric getting skewed. It's nice, even, right along this edge. So now, if this was a pocket or something, we need to turn it right side out.

And now, you might've seen in the pattern a piece or any sort of instructions, pattern instructions it'll say to clip your curves. And what that means is we are going to make little clips all along our stitching line, that's going to make it lay nice and flat when we turn it right side out. Now there's things you want to keep in mind when you're doing this. One, is that you wanna clip really close to your curve but not all the way through it. So you're getting really close to it but not all the way through it, just like that.

And then you want to know how many clips to put in around your curve, and that will depend on how drastic of a curve you have. So what I like to do is maybe I'm not sure how many clips I'm going to need. I'll probably put one here at the bottom. Maybe I'll put one on each edge like this, right around the steepest part of the curve. And then I might think, all right, well that's enough.

Well, you can always just go ahead and turn it right side out and see what it actually looks like. So we can do that with this sample here turn our piece right side out. And I'm just gonna use my fingers right on the scene. You can see this area right here. I might not be able to press out really nice and flat.

And this is telling me that I need more clips put in, in order to be able to press this curve out, nice and neat. So that's one thing you can do if you're not sure how many clips to put into a curve, is just put in a couple, turn it right side out and see what it looks like. So I had puckers happening in these areas. That means then I need to go back and put in a couple more little curves or clips along my curve. And this might seem like a really tedious process especially if you have a much larger piece, but again it's going to really affect how your overall curve or whatever it is you're sewing turns out, so it's something that you wanna do.

Now, you might be thinking, well, there's gonna be a way more efficient way to do this. And there is, and that's pinking shears. And I'm gonna show you how they work but also explain why sometimes they do not work. So this might be something that someone told you, Oh, if you need to do any sort of clipping of curves, just get pinking shears, they'll take care of it all in one easy motion. So now pinking shears, what they do is they actually cut little tiny V's, out of your fabric as you go.

Now you can see what happens though with pinking shears. So I compare the two, is yes, it's given me quite a lot of notches all the way around. All these little V's cut out and you're thinking, well, then that's definitely gotta be enough because look how many there are. But what is also done is it has really trimmed down my seam allowance, because the views are only so big on the pinking shears, I have to clip all this off in order to get the edge of my V close to my stitching. And while that might work in some cases if you're going to turn this right set out and then maybe do some top stitching, if this was something where there might be any sort of stress or any area along the seam, you have the potential to actually rip through that stitching because you've clipped off so much of your seam allowance.

So while pinking shears might seem like the go-to quick solution for clipping your curves, it might just be better to take the time to use your scissors and make your actual clips along the curve. That way you still have the larger seam allowance. And you know, that everything is gonna be nice and sturdy as you are using your curve on whatever project it is that your curve goes on. So therefore, I wanna show you one other thing real quick with a much steeper curve. And what I'm gonna do with a much steeper curve like this is essentially the same thing when I'm stitching, but I am going to make sure once again that I am always lifting my presser foot with my needle down and pivoting when I'm doing a curve.

But, because my curve is so much smaller, I don't have as much fabric out as if I had a larger circle, what's going to happen is that, because of the how big my presser foot is, I may not be able to line up this coming up edge of my curve with the corner of my presser foot, because there isn't enough fabric there my curve is too tight. So I want to make sure that I'm focusing on only the edge of my presser foot and the edge of my fabric. What I mean by that, is while I'm stitching, I still have the edge of my fabric lined up with my presser foot, but the edge of my fabric is in a little bit, because it's not big enough to line up with the edge of my foot here, right here at the corner. So again, I will stitch it in the same way, I am just changing where I'm focusing my attention on. Otherwise, I would think that I wouldn't be able to stitch this curve, because I can't keep everything lined up.

So again, you just sort of want to keep that in mind if you're stitching a really tight curve that you might have to change where your focus is while you're stitching. So you still get a nice even curve as you're going around even if you have a much narrower curve like this one compared to our larger circle like that. So the things to keep in mind when you're stitching curves. Now let's move on to corners. Corners are found on all sorts of different projects.

Whether it's pockets on the fronts of shirts, or you know, if you're making even a little apron or something where you have two layers and you have to sew along the sides and lower edge, you're going to run into corners. Now, corners, turning a corner, leaving your presser foot, lifting your presser foot and leaving your needle down is something you learn fairly early on in sewing, and as is clipping your corners. Clipping your corners much like clipping your curves, is just clipping out some form of triangle. So we're talking about our curves, we're cutting out the triangle here, we're cutting off a triangle. So this is something very common you'll see in pattern pieces, is to clip your corners when you are sewing squares.

And if I was going to go ahead and sew this square here, again, just like when I was pinning with my curves, I wanted to make sure I pinned everywhere that the fabric could shift. I would do the same thing if I was stitching a square or rectangle. I would make sure I have a pin near every corner that I'm stitching. Now, there's one thing that is kind of a fun little tip for if you're stitching corners into a much thicker fabric, either a fleece or in some cases even felt. And this is adding in a diagonal stitch.

So I'll show you what I mean. I have two layers of fleece here. And again, I am just going to stitch along this bottom edge here, these two corners. So I just wanna make sure that I have pins in both of those corners. And what I'm gonna do, is I'm going to stitch along one edge and then I'm going to take a diagonal stitch and continue along the other edge and doing that is going to help me make sure that I can really push out that corner really well.

But what I wanna do before I stitch, is I actually wanna mark my seam out, so I know where to stop. So on this example we'll just say I'm using 1/2 inch seam allowances. So I will go ahead and just make a mark, 1/2 inch there, 1/2 inch along the bottom, then we'd also do a 1/2 inch on either side. Now, a lot of times when you're stitching you can go ahead and just eyeball your seam allowance and know where you need to stop. And you know, if you're coming down, stitching down here and you stop and you pivot and maybe you haven't gone far enough, or you've gone too far, you can just turn it back and either back up or continue stitching on.

When you're going to add in a diagonal stitch, you really need to know exactly where that stitch needs to happen because you can't really go back and do it. So that's why always mark if you're going to use this technique, otherwise, you might find it doesn't work out the way you want it to. So what I'm gonna do is if I am saying, I'm using my 1/2 inch seam allowance then I'm just going to be stitching along those lines that I drew. So I'm just going to stitch down to where my lines intersect. I'm going to stop, and instead of lifting my presser foot and turning pivoting the entire corner like this, I'm going to turn it at a 45 degree angle like this.

So, if I wanted to mark an actual 45 degree line on my fabric, I could, but I know I've just turned it, I have a small piece here. I've turned it a 45 degree angle. I'm gonna take one stitch diagonal like that. And now I'm going to continue on the other side here of my square. I'll go ahead and do that one more time on my other corner again, I'm gonna stitch up into where my lines intersect.

I'm going to stop 45 degrees, do one stitch diagonally and then continue on. Okay, now I would treat it just like I would treat any other corner that I've stitched. So, by that, I mean, I would turn it over, I would clip my corners, like so, and I would get it ready to be able to turn it right side out. So you can see here, I have my stitching going down and across but I have those little diagonal stitches in the corner and that would really help me when I'm going to turn this right side down. So I'll show you what that's gonna look like here.

Again, you can use either your scissors to turn out your corners, unless you have really sharp scissors. And I wouldn't advise doing that because you could poke through your stitching. My hem ruler here has a point turner on it. So that's what I'm going to use. And you can see by doing that little diagonal stitch, I'm really able to push out the corners of that really bulky fabric, just like this, and I have a nice corner.

This may be what your corner would look like if you didn't have the diagonal stitch. You wouldn't really be able to poke out your corners as well, because you have a lot of bulk. If you're still finding that you have a lot of bulk when you're trying to turn your corners, a right side out, you can do a little extra trimming. What I mean by that is your pattern will tell you to clip the corners, and that's what this is. You can also sort of grade down into that corner.

So I'm just cutting off a little bit extra fabric going in towards that corner. I'm eliminating as much of the bulk. Once we get down to that corner as possible, then I go back and make sure I haven't added another extra point there. You can see, I have eliminated some of the fabric. That's going to get pushed into the corners from those seam allowances, and that would make it much easier when I am turning this right side out.

So that is with fleece. That's a pretty bulky fabric. Say you're working with felt, you do the same thing with felt. Let's do one corner here to show. Again, I will say, I'll have my 1/2 inch seam allowances.

I'm going to mark, so I know right where that intersection is going to happen. And in this case with a, something as thick as felt, I would actually take two diagonal stitches. So again, I'm just going to be stitching right along my line, I'm going to slow stop slightly before the intersection of my two lines, turn 45, going to do two diagonal stitches and then continue on. And the amount of diagonal stitches you do obviously the more stitches you go at a diagonal, the less of an actual point you're going to have because you are making it sort of a curved edge. But, by doing those diagonal stitches you're actually giving a little extra space, for all this bulky fabric to happen.

So, if you're stitching with just a cotton, like this sample here, then you can come straight down, pivot over, simply clip your corners off and you're good to go. As your fabric gets thicker and thicker you may want to consider adding in those diagonal stitches, and grading down towards that point to really help you be able to turn that right side out and get a nice crisp point on no matter what corner you're sewing. Give these tips to try when you're sewing your next curves or corners on any project.